Teaching and Coaching Info:
Current Teaching Rates and Fees:
Private lessons:
Violin / viola / fiddle / nyckelharpa
Beginner, 30' lessons: $45/ea or $170/set of 4
Intermediate, 45' lessons: $50/ea or $190/set of 4
Advanced, 1 hour lessons: $80/ea or $300/set of 4
Theory / Musicianship / Arranging / Composition (discounts available for college students)
30' session: $30 / $20 college
1' session: $50 / $35 college
Music Appreciation:
30' session: $30
1 hr session: $50
Group/family rates available
Additional Teaching Fees:
Studios in Santa Monica and Silverlake, use free of charge
Home Visit: $15 fee
Transit Fees for home visits:
No charge if within LA Metro Area (W to 405 freeway, N to Santa Monica Mountains, E to 605, S to 105)
$0.51/mi each mile to/from location outside of that area.
Private lessons:
Violin / viola / fiddle / nyckelharpa
Beginner, 30' lessons: $45/ea or $170/set of 4
Intermediate, 45' lessons: $50/ea or $190/set of 4
Advanced, 1 hour lessons: $80/ea or $300/set of 4
Theory / Musicianship / Arranging / Composition (discounts available for college students)
30' session: $30 / $20 college
1' session: $50 / $35 college
Music Appreciation:
30' session: $30
1 hr session: $50
Group/family rates available
Additional Teaching Fees:
Studios in Santa Monica and Silverlake, use free of charge
Home Visit: $15 fee
Transit Fees for home visits:
No charge if within LA Metro Area (W to 405 freeway, N to Santa Monica Mountains, E to 605, S to 105)
$0.51/mi each mile to/from location outside of that area.
Teaching Philosophy For Instrumental Studies
As your teacher, my job is to help you become your own teacher. Learning is a deeply personal process that requires a correspondingly personal approach. I will tailor your educational path to your own unique mind, background, habits, and preferences. However, I will also require you to attain a comprehensive knowledge of the basic elements of technique, musicianship, theory, and of the physics of acoustics. Writing will be an essential supplement your learning: creating written goals, keeping a practice log, and maintaining a “listening journal.” Your daily practice routine will consist of a mix of clearly-defined musical materials to study and spontaneous guided musical improvisations. You will complete a regimen of yearly performance goals: outreach visits, spontaneous performances, and a hour-long solo end-of-year recital that will be a celebration of your achievements. I require this balance of discipline and flexibility because I have found that it is what continues to sustain me as a professional musician. It is my goal for you to become your own mature artist who is as spiritually fulfilled as you are are financially successful though your craft.
Each person I have ever met hears music completely differently. These differences can be subtle or they can be vast. There are schools of pedagogy that seek to unify perceptions of sound through a strict imposition of musical values. I consider this approach as deeply harmful to the individual musician! I embrace differences in the perception of sound and music and value them as the driving force of each musician’s creative genius. As we work together, I will gradually begin to understand how you hear and how you process music. It is your responsibility to actively share your thoughts on sound ESPECIALLY as it relates to what you hear coming out of your own instrument. Toward this end, you will keep a daily listening journal, which I will review outside of lessons. This journal is graded on quantity of content: you must write using your own voice and never be shy of using subjective words that you fear might not make sense to others. This journal is my gift to you: years from now, you will have the pleasure of reading through it and discovering a most beautiful thin golden braid of thought--the path between your ears and your inner musical being as it grows and matures to an ever brighter unique brilliance.
While you are nurturing your uniqueness of sound perception, you will also learn the principles of intonation. Your first studies in intonation will be within equal temperament. Practicing with a digital tuner, you will gradually complete a progressive cycle of scales in all major and minor keys, starting with a single octave working up to three octaves. Once you have mastered this scale system you will be ready for my fun, famous, and intriguing “physics project” where you will learn several other useful systems of intonation by building your own instrument! The end goal of this project is to achieve a masterful flexibility of intonation that is grounded in the tangible realm of physics. This skill will not only open many diverse doors of employment, it will save you and your colleagues from countless hours of frustrated abstract debate over what “being in tune” means.
A daily warm-up routine is essential to any aspiring musician of any level. It must always be a creative distillation of the fundamental mechanics of what you are learning. A good warm-up routine consists of two parts--a careful and isolated technical drill on the mechanics of a technique followed by a creative integration of that technique into a larger musical context through etudes, snippets of assigned repertoire, or improvisation. Initially, I will assign you complete warm-up routines that will change subtly through the course of your studies. Gradually, you will begin to add your own creative devices to these routines as your skills and knowledge expand. Eventually, you will create entire routines for yourself and share them with me. Watching your own warm-up routine evolve over time is one of the most rewarding aspects of learning, and it will become a treasure-trove of musical ideas that you can gift to your own future students.
From the very beginning of your studies, you will be encouraged and required to share your music with others. I strongly emphasize that this is not “performance,” it is “sharing.” The great gift of music is that it is always more than a sum of its individual parts. The performer, the composer, the listener, the instrument, and the sound waves themselves all work together in a collaborative balance to make this an art that is always one for all and never all for one. You, the person with the instrument, simply have the best listening seat in the house! You will take part in many diverse outreach visits that I arrange with other students to senior centers, schools, shelters, and other public places where you will share your music. You will also join me in spontaneous playing in town squares, parks, pubs, and living rooms throughout our community. Finally, you will present a solo recital at the close of each year. At first, I will help you organize it but as you mature you will produce the entire event yourself. It will be a grand celebration of all that you have accomplished and learned, and a chance to get to share your discoveries with your friends and the public.
As your teacher, it is my highest duty to give you the tools you need to teach yourself whatever you wish to learn in life. Should you study diligently and discipline yourself towards ever greater freedoms of ability, it will be my highest pleasure to welcome you into a wonderful, rich, warm, and interdependent community skilled musicians the world over who can never quite share enough of what they have discovered through their love of music.
Each person I have ever met hears music completely differently. These differences can be subtle or they can be vast. There are schools of pedagogy that seek to unify perceptions of sound through a strict imposition of musical values. I consider this approach as deeply harmful to the individual musician! I embrace differences in the perception of sound and music and value them as the driving force of each musician’s creative genius. As we work together, I will gradually begin to understand how you hear and how you process music. It is your responsibility to actively share your thoughts on sound ESPECIALLY as it relates to what you hear coming out of your own instrument. Toward this end, you will keep a daily listening journal, which I will review outside of lessons. This journal is graded on quantity of content: you must write using your own voice and never be shy of using subjective words that you fear might not make sense to others. This journal is my gift to you: years from now, you will have the pleasure of reading through it and discovering a most beautiful thin golden braid of thought--the path between your ears and your inner musical being as it grows and matures to an ever brighter unique brilliance.
While you are nurturing your uniqueness of sound perception, you will also learn the principles of intonation. Your first studies in intonation will be within equal temperament. Practicing with a digital tuner, you will gradually complete a progressive cycle of scales in all major and minor keys, starting with a single octave working up to three octaves. Once you have mastered this scale system you will be ready for my fun, famous, and intriguing “physics project” where you will learn several other useful systems of intonation by building your own instrument! The end goal of this project is to achieve a masterful flexibility of intonation that is grounded in the tangible realm of physics. This skill will not only open many diverse doors of employment, it will save you and your colleagues from countless hours of frustrated abstract debate over what “being in tune” means.
A daily warm-up routine is essential to any aspiring musician of any level. It must always be a creative distillation of the fundamental mechanics of what you are learning. A good warm-up routine consists of two parts--a careful and isolated technical drill on the mechanics of a technique followed by a creative integration of that technique into a larger musical context through etudes, snippets of assigned repertoire, or improvisation. Initially, I will assign you complete warm-up routines that will change subtly through the course of your studies. Gradually, you will begin to add your own creative devices to these routines as your skills and knowledge expand. Eventually, you will create entire routines for yourself and share them with me. Watching your own warm-up routine evolve over time is one of the most rewarding aspects of learning, and it will become a treasure-trove of musical ideas that you can gift to your own future students.
From the very beginning of your studies, you will be encouraged and required to share your music with others. I strongly emphasize that this is not “performance,” it is “sharing.” The great gift of music is that it is always more than a sum of its individual parts. The performer, the composer, the listener, the instrument, and the sound waves themselves all work together in a collaborative balance to make this an art that is always one for all and never all for one. You, the person with the instrument, simply have the best listening seat in the house! You will take part in many diverse outreach visits that I arrange with other students to senior centers, schools, shelters, and other public places where you will share your music. You will also join me in spontaneous playing in town squares, parks, pubs, and living rooms throughout our community. Finally, you will present a solo recital at the close of each year. At first, I will help you organize it but as you mature you will produce the entire event yourself. It will be a grand celebration of all that you have accomplished and learned, and a chance to get to share your discoveries with your friends and the public.
As your teacher, it is my highest duty to give you the tools you need to teach yourself whatever you wish to learn in life. Should you study diligently and discipline yourself towards ever greater freedoms of ability, it will be my highest pleasure to welcome you into a wonderful, rich, warm, and interdependent community skilled musicians the world over who can never quite share enough of what they have discovered through their love of music.
